This incident highlights the main drawback of relying on AI chatbots as a replacement for search engines - their tendency to make up information. After Reuters first reported on Bard's erroneous response, shares of Alphabet, Google's parent company, saw a 7.7% drop, resulting in a $100 billion loss in market value.

On Monday, Google announced its AI-powered chatbot Bard - a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT - which should be more widely available to the public in the coming weeks. As part of the marketing, Google shared a GIF of Bard answering a question: "What new insights from the James Webb Space Telescope can I share with my nine-year-old?" In his answer, Bard makes three key points, one of which says the telescope took "the first-ever images of a planet outside our solar system." However, several astronomers on Twitter have disputed that claim, saying that the first image of an exoplanet was actually taken in 2004, according to NASA's website.

The Bard's blunder highlights the hurdles Google must overcome as it seeks to integrate AI technology into its main search engine. The internet already presents a plethora of false and misleading information, and this problem is compounded by the efforts of Microsoft and Google to use these tools as search engines. The chatbots' answers, meanwhile, have the authority of a seemingly omniscient machine.